Advanced Navigation, the world’s most determined innovator in artificial intelligence (AI) for robotic and navigation technologies, is announcing the largest subsea robotics facility in Australia, located in Balcatta, Western Australia (WA). The high tech manufacturing and R&D facility will accelerate the production of the company's revolutionary underwater technologies, including its autonomous underwater robot, Hydrus.  “Now more than ever, there is a need to open up the earth's oceans, to make data and knowledge more accessible to global communities, research institutions and governments. Western Australia has always been an exploration hub for ocean discoveries.  The new subsea center will help Advanced Navigation meet the growing demand for high-grade underwater data, bringing new and existing solutions to market far more quickly and efficiently. With the goal to grow our subsea team threefold, we are confident this investment will deepen and advance our understanding of the oceans." said Xavier Orr, CEO and co-founder, Advanced Navigation....

Removing trash from the ocean may not be as harmless as it seems. That’s the conclusion of new research, which finds that marine dumps known as “garbage patches” are home to countless delicate creatures that could perish when people scoop debris from the sea. The oceans are home to five major garbage patches. They form far from land where strong currents swirl together, ferrying trash of all sizes. Some of it has been eroded by the churn into tiny debris known as microplastics. The largest of these marine debris fields is known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Spanning 1.6 million square kilometers midway between Hawaii and the coast of California, it was first observed in 1997 by Charles Moore, an oceanographer and founder of Algalita Marine Research and Education. The patch escaped notice for so long because most of its contents aren’t easily spotted from afar. To see whether the Great...

Revamped tropical Pacific buoys could aid atmospheric river forecasts For 3 years in a row, cool La Nina conditions have reigned in the tropical Pacific Ocean, suppressing the steady march of global warming. But warm waters are now rolling east and gathering off the west coast of South America, signaling the likely arrival of El Niño later this year and, next year, a surge in heat that could push the planet past 1.5°C of warming. These fluctuations in the Pacific—the greatest short-term control on global climate—once caught the world off guard. But they are now predictable months in advance, largely because of the Tropical Atmosphere Ocean (TAO) array, a series of 55 U.S. buoys, moored to the sea floor, that stretch some 13,000 kilometers along the equator. Now, the TAO array is getting a $23 million overhaul, the first since it was set up in the mid-1990s, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric...

One of the most widespread pollutants in the ocean is also one of the hardest to see. Trillions of tiny particles of plastic—known as microplastics—can clog the intestines of fish, destroy the tissues of marine creatures, and cause entire populations to decline. Their small size also makes them almost impossible to clean up. Now, scientists have discovered a marine organism that’s not just invulnerable to microplastics, it may have a way to eliminate them—literally. The blue mussel (Mytilus edulis)—a voracious, filter-feeding mollusk with a blue-black shell—ingests microplastics and other pollutants alongside its typical fare, sequestering the contaminants in feces that are much easier to remove from the water than are the plastics themselves. The mussels are essentially “putting the rubbish out for us to collect,” says Penelope Lindeque, an ecologist at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory who led the research. To conduct the work, Lindeque and her colleagues collected blue mussels from...

World’s largest survey of Pacific corals clocked 100,000 kilometres, collecting 58,000 samples from 249 locations, including Indonesia, Japan and Papua New Guinea. The largest-ever survey of Pacific Ocean corals has found that there’s likely to be more genetic diversity in the world’s coral reefs than researchers previously thought. This assessment is based on a collection of studies reporting the results of the Tara Pacific expedition, a two-year research voyage of the vessel, Tara, which surveyed the genetic, chemical and microbial diversity of coral reefs. Researchers estimate that more than half of global coral coverage has disappeared over the past 70 years, along with 60% of the associated species diversity1. Marine scientists, microbiologists and crew members together clocked 100,000 kilometres after setting sail from the port of Lorient in France on 28 May 2016. They collected 58,000 samples of water, aerosols, coral, fish and plankton from 249 locations, including in Indonesia, Japan and Papua New...